Wednesday, February 18, 2009
- I'm fat. Can't deny it any longer. I feel skinny, but I'm just not. I think I've been able to deny it so long because I had pretty good muscle tone. The muscles are leaving and the fat is replacing it, so even though the needle on the scale has been stationary for a couple of years, I am increasing in size. My lower body has been getting bigger since I started exercising, I think, because my muscles are getting bigger but I'm not losing any fat. Hopefully this public declaration will help push me into a proper diet. I'm don't like diet helpers like pills or drinks, because I know when I go off them I'll simply gain the weight back. No yo-yo dieting for me. I'd like to eat natural foods and very little sugar and literally exercise my ass off. 50 lbs is my goal. I'll even post my starting weight to properly embarrass myself into decreasing the number: 178.
- Having a teenage step-daughter in my life (Hi, Z) makes me think about love. What is it, really? Is it based in the physical, i.e. a hormonal imbalance leading to temporary delusion? Based in a higher power, moving us toward our soul mate? A karmic fulfillment of your purpose as a human being? I take a different view for each of the different types of love, and I wish to hell we had a different word for each one. LOVE is too broad.
- Which leads me to the question: Should you feel guilty about your feelings? In any case, love is not a conscious decision, so if you "fall in love" with someone (whatever the eff that means) at an inopportune time, is that something to regret, or to celebrate no matter what? The emotion itself is a good thing, right? Or is romantic love inherently disruptive?
- Bohemian Rhapsody just came on my media player. Woo!
- Also thinking about the recent economic downturn as portrayed by the media. People are saying things like, "People can't even send their kids to college anymore!" "This guy can't pay his $7,000 mortagage and may have to go to a smaller house! It's a tragedy!" "They've had to forgo their yearly vacation to the Bahamas! In my world, people don't send kids to college. The kids do it themselves. People live in very modest dwellings and buy their clothes at Goodwill to save money for entertainment. They have no savings. They don't take vacations. I'm not saying it's fun to have the rug pulled out of you at any income level, and I hate what it's doing to our economy as a whole, but on a personal level I guess I just can't fathom having that much money in the first place, and so I can't sympathize as much as the media wants me to. That makes me sound like a total bitch, probably. From where I am, the middle class is a myth. Am I middle class? I think I am, barely. But the middle class I see represented on tv as the "average"? Those people are rich to me. To say there's a huge difference between $30,000/yr and #100,000/yr is a massive understatement, but they're lumped into the same category. My mind is boggled, that's all.
This was a heavy TftT, huh? Discuss among yourselves.
"Love, chemically no different than eating large amounts of chocolate."
ReplyDeleteOther than quoting a less-than-perfect Al Pacino movie, I haven't much to say.
Oh, wait. How 'bout this. On Queen's 2nd album Queen II. There are these two songs that span: March of the Black Queen and Funny How Love Is. This is the breeding ground for Bohemian Rhapsody. A great pair of songs that doesn't get much attention as many Queen fans tend to neglect the tunes that weren't hits. Which is quite a shame as Queen has made some incredible music over the years that is very rarely being exposed to the masses while I hear BR on the radio each and every single day.
I wish my scale number was as low as yours. Ponder THAT for a while.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's something that I thought of, Knyt, but that didn't make it in the post. $100,000 here goes a LOT farther than other places, and those people on the news are in other places. But I just threw that number out there. It's really about quality of life, and I think yours and mine are comparable, though mine is more stable at the moment. You're not taking vacations, either. :)
ReplyDeleteWoo for Bohemian Rhapsody!
ReplyDeleteAs for the love thing - the Greeks had a least 4 different words for it, and maybe 5 if memory serves. But I totally disagree with you on it being an emotion. I define it as a choice, an act of will. The feeling ebbs and flows, the action - doing something good for someone else even if you don't feel like it, defines love. A great book on love is The Road Less Travelled, by M. Scott Peck.
(did we change the way travelled is spelled now? spellcheck wants me to write traveled and that just seems so wrong to me!)
Oh, I see I misunderstood Knyt meant weight, not income. Sorry. :)
ReplyDeleteFal, so what do you call the actual emotion that most people call "love"?
"I’m fat. Can’t deny it any longer."
ReplyDeleteMy favorite SpongeBob moment is when Plankton says "I cannot deny it any longer! I'm small." Ok, it's not really relevant to what you wrote, but it reminded me of it and it always makes me laugh whichi I really needed right now so thanks!
Speaking of love (?). Try telling a 17-year old that what she is feeling is an "act of will." What she feels is real. How she chooses to act on it is where the "will" part comes in. And why this has been a pretty intense year in our house, sigh.
it is disorienting to see the wide divergence in our society between levels of incomes and general life circumstances. And it's so hard to know where we fall on the economic ladder. We're better off than some (most, if you count the rest of the world) and worse off than others. So I try to focus on what I do have, not what I did have, or could've had. Some days that's easier said than done. Like today.
Travelling is the Brit spelling. Traveling is American. See, the economy is so bad, we're losing our Ls.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, a feeling isn't wrong exactly, but what we do with it may well be. Such is my two cents.
Ha. Yeah, we don't take vacations. We have next to no retirement. And what college fund? The standard of living hasn't changed much in this apartment because we don't have money already. I heard this story on NPR about women cutting back by going to a spa instead of vacation. I don't feel sorry for these people either. I nixed a massage the other day because that felt extravagant.
Besides, having lived two years in Bulgaria has keep a lot this money nonsense in perspective.
Those "feelings" that people generally associate with "love" are what I call lust, or infatuation. A teenager thinks they're "so in love it will last forever!" Next week, they like someone else. That's lust, that's infatuation. That's "oh he makes me feel ... ." It's totally self-involved. It's also pretty much exclusively hormonally generated.
ReplyDeleteLove, on the other hand, thinks of the other person - "How can I make him feel? What can I do for this person to make them happy?" Love puts the self aside and does for the other, sometimes even at the expense of self. That is a choice, and a choice is an act of will.
I didn't change my baby's dirty diapers because I got anything out of it, I did it because it was best for my baby that I do so. Love is putting someone else first, and not ourselves.
A big love test for me was, "Am I willing to clean up this person's vomit if they're sick?" Needless to say, I didn't love as often as I thought I did. ;)
Still, I wouldn't write off all teenagers as only being in "lust." I don't actually think it's age-specific. Plenty of adults never get past being in lust. I think it has to do with one's capacity to put the self aside, as you said- and believe it or not, I've known a teenager or two (granted, older teens) who get this. And many, many adults who never do.
ReplyDeleteSarah, I've known those same adults. ;)
ReplyDelete[...] planned to discuss love in this post, building on the comments from yesterday, but I’m out of time. Next time, [...]
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